Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Father's Day

My Father's Day this year started out pretty rough: I'm juggling too many balls right now and that's got me in a miserable frame of mind. But my Annie and the prospect of having my daughters over for dinner helped me crawl out of my hole a bit and in the end, it was a good day for me.

Awesome Burgers: I Ground Them Myself

These burgers don't look like commercial burgers because they are not. I ground them myself from some really fantastic skirt steak from Martin's Angus Beef, our suppliers at the restaurant. They also don't taste like commercial burgers. They have amazing beef flavor.

I decided to do a couple of different condiments this year (and at the last second, I decided that my burger was just too good to go on a bun). The first is a caramelized onion-bacon-stout-blue cheese jam made from two very large yellow onions caramelized with a pound of diced bacon then cooked in a bottle of Tröegs JavaHead Stout until the beer evaporated, and then a half pound of really good blue cheese stirred in until melted. The other condiment is a chipotle mustard made from half Maille whole grain mustard and half adobo from a can of chipotle peppers.

And as for hike number 2 of our 52-hike challenge this year: Sunday afternoon saw a temperature of 15 degrees with windchill well below zero...

About Us

Ann and Ed wake up fiending for great coffee and thinking "What's for dinner tonight?" On our rare days off (Ed is the chef/owner of One Block West restaurant in Winchester, VA) we can be found on a trail in the Shenandoah Valley or nearby in Virginia, West Virginia, or Maryland. And after our hikes, we're looking for good food, wine, and craft beer.

Our kids are grown now and we are more free than we have been in 25 years to go, to be, to explore, and to flip a coin about which fork in the road we take next. Recent deaths of our parents remind us that life is short and that we should enjoy each day. This blog is a journal of our twists and turns as we consider each fork.